Long Beach’s Museum of Latin American Art is marking its 20th birthday with an all-museum install of the permanent collection. With many newly acquired objects, “MOLAA at Twenty” demonstrates how the museum has both transcended and is limited by the collection of founder Robert Gumbiner. (Above, Abel Ventoso’s LT3, 2009, a recent gift of the Albertella Family Trust.)

Gumbiner (1923-2009) was a physician who figured out how to monetize Medicare with a chain of HMOs. The exhibition begins with a recreation of one of his waiting rooms. Dr. Gumbiner assembled a huge collection of Latin-American modernism and converted one of his medical offices to a the present museum, in 1996. The site had a long and motley history as a silent film studio and a roller rink.

Gumbiner favored existential mid-century modernism, by artists successful in their homeland but hardly on the radar elsewhere. That has long been the biggest appeal, and the biggest limitation, of the collection. It’s great to see works by artists from Ecuador, Costa Rica, or Argentina, as they’re hardly to be encountered at other local museums. But Gumbiner did not buy too much by the handful of most globally appreciated artists. Major artists are often represented by minor works. A late Matta painting is as boring as the HMO waiting room, and such artists as Lam and Carrington are represented only by prints.

Fernando Botero was, at very least, the Norman Rockwell of Colombia. Gumbiner bought a relatively late (1998) charcoal on canvas,Woman with Mirror. It’s paired here with another large charcoal and a small bronze multiple.

Some of the most interesting recent acquisitions are works on paper, such as a volcano study by Dr. Atl and a tiny 1934 ink drawing by Joaquín Torres García, Constructivist Composition.

The Torres Garcia drawing is in a room of geometric abstraction that is one of the show’s highlights. One of the trippiest objects is Cristián Mac Entyre’s Aesopic Pulsion (2013). With its curved mirror, it looks back to the works of fellow Argentinian Julio Le Parc. Mac Entyre’s relatively small object adds marble spheres, real and virtual, to your funhouse selfie. Another Argentine wrote: “Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men…”

Only in recent years has MOLAA pursued Chicano art and indeed, the usual sort of contemporary art (i.e., “anything but magic-realist painting”). These more recent pieces, some on view for the first time, are among most promising. Yet the collection remains threadbare. MOLAA is showing a framed print of a clouded sky by Félix Gonzáles-Torres. It’s actually from one of Gonzáles-Torres’ stacks: the conceptual works in which a museum displays a stack of posters on the floor, and visitors are invited to take one as a souvenir. MOLAA does not own the conceptual piece. This is just the souvenir, framed like a regular print.

(Heads up to thrifty collectors: MOCA Geffen is now showing Gonzáles-Torres A Corner of Baci. Take one foil-wrapped chocolate as your museum-worthy ready-made. I would promise mine to MOLAA except that I ate it.)

Rubén Ortiz-Torres’ Big Bang (2012) is a revival of fetish finish, executed in the temperature-sensitive material used for mood rings. It’s not the sort of art that Gumbiner collected, but it’s one of the most compelling paintings in the show. Unfortunately it’s hung next to an exit, under indifferent lighting. “MOLAA at Twenty” is still a work in progress.